Europe, Asia, Africa or
Australia. If it were, we would know about them. As it happens, this
second Grand Canyon is only in plain, nearby, home-staying America; so
when boys of the Forest Service pulled Little Zeke out of his gypsum and
pumice stone dust and measured him up and found him only twenty-three
inches long, though the hair sticking to the skull was gray and the
teeth were those of an adult--as it happened in only matter-of-fact,
commonplace America, poor Little Zeke couldn't get shelter. They
trounced his little dry bones round Silver City, New Mexico, for a few
months. Then they boxed him up and shipped him away to be stored out of
sight in the cellars of the Smithsonian, at Washington. As Zeke has been
asleep since the Ice Age, or about ten to eight thousand years B. C., it
doesn't make very much difference to him; but one wonders what in the
world New Mexico was doing allowing one of the most wonderful specimens
of a prehistoric dwarf race ever found to be shipped out of the country.

It was in the Gila Canyon that the Forestry Service boys found him. By
some chance, they at once dubbed the little mummy "Zeke." The Gila is a
typical box-canyon, walled as a tunnel, colored in fire tints like the
Grand Canyon, literally terraced and honeycombed with the cave dwellings
of a prehistoric race. It lies some fifty miles as the crow flies from
Silver City; but the way the crow flies and the way man travels are an
altogether different story in the wild lands of the Gila Mountains.
You'll have to make the most of the way on horseback with tents for
hotels, or better still the stars for a roof. Besides, what does it
matter when or how the little scrub of a twenty-three-inch man lived
anyway? We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how
cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave
men--ask Jack London if you don't believe it--were hairy monsters, not
quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal
appendage--hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the
hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
That is the way they got their wives. (Perhaps, if Little Zeke could
speak, he would think he ought to sue moderns for libel. He might think
that our "blond-beast" theories are a reflex of our own civilization. He
might smile through his grinning jaws.)

Anyway, there lies Little Zeke, a long time asleep, wrapped in cerements
of fine